CHAPTER XIX! ! !RELIGION AND EUGENICS!

CHAPTER XIX!
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!RELIGION AND EUGENICS!
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Man is the only animal with a religion. The conduct of the lower animals
!is guided by instinct,[186] and instinct normally works for the benefit of the species. Any action which is dictated by instinct is likely to result in the preservation of the species, even at the expense of the individual which acts, provided there has not been a recent change in the environment.
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But in the human species reason appears, and conduct is no longer governed by instinct alone. A young man is impelled by instinct, for instance, to marry. It is to the interests of the species that he marry, and instinct therefore causes him to desire to marry and to act as he desires. A lower animal would obey the impulse of instinct without a moment's hesitation. Not so the man. Reason intervenes and asks, "Is this really the best thing for you to do now? Would you not better wait awhile and get a start in your business? Of course marriage would be
agreeable, but you must not be short-sighted. You don't want to assume a handicap just now." There is a corresponding reaction among the married in respect to bearing additional children. The interests of self are immediate and easily seen, the interests of the species are not so pressing. In any such conflict between instinct and reason, one must
!win; and if reason wins it is in some cases for the immediate benefit of the individual but at the expense of the species' interests.

Now with reason dominant over instinct in man, there is a grave danger


!that with each man consulting his own interests instead of those of the species, some groups and even races will become exterminated. Along with reason, therefore, it is necessary that some other forces shall appear to control reason and give the interests of the species a chance to be heard along with the interests of the individual.

One such force is religion. Without insisting that this is the only view which may be taken of the origin of religion, or that this is the only function of religion, we may yet assert that one of the useful purposes served by religion is to cause men to adopt lines of conduct that will be for the good of the race, although it may sacrifice the immediate
good of the individual.[187] Thus if a young Mohammedan be put in the situation just described, he may decide that it is to his material
!interest to postpone marriage. His religion then obtrudes itself, with quotations from the Prophet to the effect that Hell is peopled with bachelors. The young man is thereupon moved to marry, even if it does cause some inconvenience to his business plans. Religion, reinforcing instinct, has triumphed over reason and gained a victory for the larger interests of the species, when they conflict with the immediate interests of the individual.

From this point of view we may, paraphrasing Matthew Arnold, define religion as motivated ethics. Ethics is a knowledge of right conduct, religion is an agency to produce right conduct. And its working is more like that of instinct than it is like that of reason. The irreligious
man, testing a proposition by reason alone, may decide that it is to the interests of all concerned that he should not utter blasphemy. The orthodox Christian never considers the pros and cons of the question; he
has the Ten Commandments and the teachings of his youth in his mind, and he refrains from blasphemy in almost the instinctive way that he
!refrains from putting his hand on a hot stove.

This chapter proposes primarily to consider how eugenics can be linked with religion, and specifically the Christian religion; but the problem
is not a simple one, because Christianity is made of diverse elements. Not only has it undergone some change during the last 1900 years, but it was founded upon Judaism, which itself involved diverse elements. We shall undertake to show that eugenics fits in well with Christianity;
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!but it must fit in with different elements in different ways. We can distinguish four phases of religion:
Charm and taboo, or reward and punishment in the present life. The believer in these processes thinks that certain acts possess particular efficacies beyond those evident to his observation and reason; and that peculiar malignities are to be expected as the consequence of certain other acts. Perhaps no one in the memory of the tribe has ever tested one of these acts to find whether the expected result would appear; it is held as a matter of religious belief that the result would appear,
!and the act is therefore avoided.

Reward and punishment in a future life after death. Whereas the first


system was supposed to bring immediate reward and punishment as the result of certain acts, this second system postpones the result to an
after-life. There is in nature a system of reward and punishment which everyone must have observed because it is part of the universal sequence of cause and effect; but these two phases of religion carry the idea
still farther; they postulate rewards and punishments of a supernatural character, over and above those which naturally occur. It is important to note that in neither of these systems is God essentially involved.
!They are in reality independent of the idea of God, since that is called "luck" in some cases which in others is called the favour or wrath of God. And again in some cases, one may be damned by a human curse, although in others this curse of damnation is reserved for divine power.

Theistic religion. In essence this consists of the satisfaction
derived from doing that which pleases God, or "getting into harmony with the underlying plan of the universe," as some put it. It is idealistic
and somewhat mystic. It should be distinguished from the idea of doing or believing certain things to insure salvation, which is not
!essentially theistic but belongs under (2). The true theist desires to conform to the will of God, wholly apart from whether he will be rewarded or punished for so doing.

!Humanistic religion. This is a willingness to make the end of ethics the totality of happiness of all men, or some large group of men, rather than to judge conduct solely by its effects on some one individual. At its highest, it is a sort of loyalty to the species.

It must be noted that most cults include more than one of these elements--usually all of them at various stages. As a race rises in intelligence, it tends to progress from the first two toward the last two, but usually keeping parts of the earlier attitude, more or less clearly expressed. And individual adherents of a religion usually have different ideas of its scope; thus the religious ideas of many Christians embrace all four of the above elements; others who equally
!consider themselves Christians may be influenced by little more than (4) alone, or (3) alone, or even (2) alone.

!With this rough sketch of religious ideas in mind, the part religion can play at the present day in advancing the eugenic interests of the race or species may be considered. Each religion can serve eugenics just as well as it can serve any other field of ethics, and by the very same devices. We shall run over our four types again and note what appeals eugenics can make to each one.

Reward and punishment in this life. Here the value of children, emotionally and economically, to their parents in their later life can be shown, and the dissatisfaction that is felt by the childless. The
emotions may be reached (as they have been reached in past centuries) by the painting of Madonnas, the singing of lullabies, by the care of the
baby sister, by the laurel wreath of the victorious son, by the great choruses of white-robed girls, by the happiness of the bride, and by the sentiment of the home. Here are some of the noblest subjects for the


arts, which in the past have unconsciously served eugenics well. In a less emotional way, a deep desire for that "terrestrial immortality" involved in posterity should be fostered. The doctrine of the continuity of germ-plasm might play a large part in religion. It should at least be
brought home to everyone at some point in his education. Man should have a much stronger feeling of identity with his forebears and his progeny.
!Is it not a loss to Christians that they have so much less of this feeling than the Chinese?

In so far as the foregoing appeals to reason alone it is not religion.
!The appeal to reason must either be emotionalised or coloured with the supernatural to be religion.

Reward and punishment in a future life. Here the belief in the absolute, verbal inspiration of sacred writings and the doctrine of salvation by faith alone are rapidly passing, and it is therefore the easier to bring eugenics into this type of religion. Even where salvation by faith is still held as an article of creed, it is
accompanied by the concession that he who truly believes will manifest his belief by works. Altruism can be found in the sacred writings of probably all religions, and the modern tendency is to make much of such passages, in which it is easy for the eugenist to find a warrant. What
!is needed here, then, is to impress upon the leaders in this field that eugenic conduct is a "good work" and as such they may properly include it along with other modern virtues, such as honest voting and abstinence from graft as a key to heaven. Dysgenic conduct should equally be taught to be an obstacle to salvation.

Theism. The man who is most influenced by the desire to be at one with God naturally wants to act in accordance with God's plan. But God being omnibeneficent, he necessarily believes that God's plan is that which is for the best interests of His children--unless he is one of
!those happily rare individuals who still believe that the end of man is to glorify God by voice, not by means of human betterment.

This type of religion (and the other types in different degrees) is a great motive power. It both creates energy in its adherents, and directs that energy into definite outlets. It need only be made convincingly evident that eugenics is truly a work of human betterment,--really the
greatest work of human betterment, and a partnership with God--to have it taken up by this type of religion with all the enthusiasm which it
!brings to its work.

!The task of enlisting the humanist appears to be even simpler. It is merely necessary to show him that eugenics increases the totality of happiness of the human species. Since the keynote of his devotion is loyalty, we might make this plea: "Can we not make every superior man or woman ashamed to accept existence as a gift from his or her ancestors, only to extinguish this torch instead of handing it on?"

Eugenics is in some ways akin to the movement for the conservation of natural resources. In pioneer days a race uses up its resources without


!hesitation. They seem inexhaustible. Some day it is recognised that they are not inexhaustible, and then such members of the race as are guided by good ethics begin to consider the interests of the future.

Provision for the future of the individual leads, in a very low state of civilisation, to the accumulation of wealth. Even the ants and squirrels have so much ethics! Higher in the evolutionary scale comes provision for the future of children; their interests lead to the foundation of
the family and, at a much later date, a man looks not only to his immediate children but to future generations of heirs, when he entails his estates and tries to establish a notable family line. Provision for the future is the essence of his actions. But so far only the individual
or those related closely to him have been taken into consideration. With a growth of altruism, man begins to recognise that he must make provision for the future of the race; that he should apply to all
!superior families the same anxiety which he feels that his children shall not tarnish the family name by foolish marriages; that they shall grow up strong and intelligent. This feeling interpreted by science is eugenics, an important element of which is religion: for religion more than any other influence leads one to look ahead, and to realise that immediate benefits are not the greatest values that man can secure in life,--that there is something beyond and superior to eating, drinking and being merry.

!If the criterion of ethical action is the provision it makes for the future, then the ethics of the eugenist must rank high, for he not only looks far to the future, but takes direct and effective steps to safeguard the future.

It is not difficult to get people to see the value of eugenics,--to give an intellectual adhesion to it. But as eugenics sometimes calls for seeming sacrifices, it is much more difficult to get people to act
!eugenically. We have at numerous points in this book emphasised the necessity of making the eugenic appeal emotional, though it is based fundamentally on sound reasoning from facts of biology.
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